Category Archives: Columnists

Hello, Lent!

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Fran Lavelle

Kneading Faith
By Fran Lavelle
I don’t know about you, but I am thrilled to welcome Lent. Questions of what we can do to mark the season with meaning and purpose gives rise to some serious introspection. The thing is, for most of us, Spring is a marathon run at sprint speeds. From the blooming of the first daffodil in mid-February until the last pecan tree sets its leaves, the unfolding of Spring is as chaotic as it is beautiful.
The austerity of Lent is the Dr. Jekyll to Spring’s Mr. Hyde. That is, perhaps, the reason I am grateful for the season, especially this year. The speed of life really does ramp up the older one gets. Months that used to drag on forever in my youth now seem to pass with warp speed. I remember in grade school the time between Halloween and Thanksgiving seemed like an eternity. Now it feels like a few days.
The very last thing we need is to allow our Lenten observations to become check marks in our already hectic lives. Yes, Lent should have a measure of sacrifice but if our Lenten observations add to our “list of things to do” and are not opportunities to be experienced, we are merely adding cargo to the hamster wheel.
Searching for some new ideas I turned to my friend and arbitrator of all disagreements, Google. The internet is full of ideas of what to do to make Lent more meaningful, from “40 things to fast from” to “50 new things to give up for Lent” which, no lie, included falling asleep at Church. Dang, that’s deep. I’ve thought about this a lot and concluded that I will observe Lent a little differently this year. For what it is worth, here’s my list:
1) This year I am going fast from being busy. Now this does not mean that I will not get my work done or cease in being productive. What it does mean is I will be measured in my response to the work at hand. I can be Chicken Little and squawk about the sky falling, as in proclaiming my busy-ness to anyone who will listen, or I can be grateful for the opportunities for encounter with others that my work brings.
2) I am going to be intentional in accepting others where they are. I have discovered the hard way that there are difficult people in all walks of life. Our family, workplace, volunteer group, and Bible study group all have one thing in common, people. We are all created in the likeness and image of God. Understanding that we are all God’s beloved should stop us dead in our tracks. To quote Pope Francis, “Who am I to judge?”
3) I’m going to spend more time with and be more present to the people I love. In the past two years, three of my contemporaries from high school and college have died. All three in their mid-fifties. Their deaths have been a huge wake-up call for me. I need to spend more time with my family and friends to laugh more, love more and enjoy one another more.
4) In spending more time with people I love, I might laugh a little harder, drink some good wine and share a delicious meal or two. There is something wholesome in gathering people around my table. I recently had a dinner for some friends who are moving. We laughed and shared stories, we enjoyed a good meal, and in all of it I was reminded that the love is real, and love is eternal. It is not a matter of excess. It is not an expression of gluttony. It is an intentional effort to be present in the moment. In hospitality, I am called to enjoy the gift and blessings of family and friends. Mind you, I will honor the time that I am alone and quieted and present to God. Those times are essential. I find great value in God’s word, “But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” Matthew 6:6 However, I also see value in being present and loving well. That well may mean having salmon instead of fish sticks.
5) Last but not least, I am going to work on dumping my relationship with fear. This is a big one. More than I care to admit, I am afraid of the unknown. Too often, I fall into the rabbit hole that can lead me on an exhausting litany of “what ifs”. Fear guts my faith and disrupts my trust in God. One. Day. At. A. Time. This is the one that will be the hardest to be present to, but I am putting myself in front of the situation and opening a dialogue with God asking for help.
St. Augustine reminds us that, “Fear is the enemy of love.” If true, then love is the antidote for fear. At the end of my examination, at the end of the introspection is the voice of God calling me to love more profoundly. A bit more challenging than giving up falling to sleep in Mass. But if I am successful in even a very small way, I can’t think of a better way to spend these 40 days of Lent.

(Fran Lavelle is the director of the Department of Faith Formation for the Diocese of Jackson.)

“Active participation” not activity

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Father Aaron Williams

SPIRIT AND TRUTH
By Father Aaron Williams
In my previous article, I introduced the topic of the Solemn Liturgy as envisioned by the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council. Now, I wish to begin considering certain elements which the Council Fathers named as essential to that form of worship: the first and most fundamental of which is the active participation of the faithful. Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, states, “Mother Church earnestly desires that all the faithful should be led to that fully conscious and active participation in liturgical celebrations which is demanded by the very nature of the liturgy” (14). The question, however, is how we are to define what constitutes this sort of participation. In recent years, it has been the trend to attempt to meet this standard of participation by making ‘jobs’ for people at Mass — a large number of Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion, dividing readings into sections particularly at school Masses so that several students can each read a portion, or only using musical selections which the congregation can easily sing without preparation.
While there is certainly legitimate room for lay participation in the liturgy in certain specific roles, the vision of the Second Vatican Council cannot be reduced to mere “activity”— such that we only consider people to be actively participating in the Mass if they have some particular and individual task. The Sacred Liturgy is the foremost place where we express the unity of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ and thus the greatest participation in the liturgy can only be expressed in those ways that the Body acts as a whole and not as individual functionaries.
When the term “active participation” first appeared in a Papal document, it was in 1903 when Pope Saint Pius X wrote to the faithful in the Diocese of Rome in order to encourage a greater and active participation, particularly by chanting the dialogues and responses at Mass.
In most places today, parishes never experience this sort of participation. But, Pope Pius X considered it a beautiful and fundamental expression of the unity of the Church to see the priest and faithful elevate their various dialogues into song—the chanting of the greeting (“The Lord be with you”) or the Preface of the Mass, as well as the various texts of the Ordinary (the “Gloria” or the “Sanctus”). But, more than that, his later successor, Pope Pius XII, commended the faithful to a participation which unified the mind to the voice. It was his desire that the faithful prepare themselves first by learning about the Mass and the articles of the faith that the liturgy expresses, so that when they make their responses at Mass, they do so with a real interior spirit of faith. To this end, he encouraged the publication of personal missals containing the readings and prayers of the Mass so the faithful could study them before Mass and pray with them during the Mass as a way of mentally joining themselves to the prayers that the priest speaks aloud in their name.
Pope Saint John Paul II underlined that participation in the liturgy is much more than speaking or gestures, but can even be deeply spiritual in the form of meditative silence. He says, “Worshippers are not passive, for instance, when listening to the readings or the homily, or following the prayers of the celebrant and the chants and music of the liturgy. These are experiences of silence and stillness, but they are in their own way profoundly active.”
What is truly regrettable, is that in the modern experience of the liturgy, many parishes treat the aim of active participation as a requirement to get people “involved” in various roles. But, this is really at its heart a hidden form of clericalism, or at least a lack of true understanding of the lay vocation to holiness. It is not just the sort of recognizable ministerial “roles” at the Mass which make us holy, as if the lay faithful “miss out” on something deeply spiritual by not taking on particular tasks, or as if only the priest has access to the highest form of participation. Rather, true participation — even on the part of the priest — requires a spiritual closeness to the Lord in the Mass.
For this, we should take as our model the Blessed Virgin Mary. She gives the greatest image of active participation by her quiet observance of the Crucifixion. It was not her who was nailed to the Cross, but her own participation was heightened and perfected by uniting her heart to the sacrifice of her Son. It should be our aim above all else that, in the Mass, we can achieve this level of participation by our awareness of the prayers and readings, our interior prayer, our disciplined preparation before Mass. We are not mere spectators, nor are we actors — we are members of the Body of Christ in the Mass and the members of the Body must be united in their heart to the mind of the Head, who is Christ the Lord.

(Father Aaron Williams is the parochial vicar at Greenville St. Joseph Parish and serves as the liaison to seminarians for the Office of Vocations.)

Struggling inside our own skin

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Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
I’ve been both blessed and cursed by a congenital restlessness that hasn’t always made my life easy. I remember as a young boy restlessly wandering the house, the yard, and then the open pastures of my family’s farm on the prairies. Our family was close, my life was protected and secure, and I was raised in a solid religious faith. That should have made for a peaceful and stable childhood and, for the most part, it did. I count myself lucky.
But all of this stability, at least for me, didn’t preclude an unsettling restlessness. More superficially, I felt this in the isolation of growing up in a rural community that seemed far removed from life in the big cities. The lives I saw on television and read about in the newspapers and magazines appeared to me to be much bigger, more exciting, and more significant than my own. My life, by comparison, paled, seemed small, insignificant, and second-best. I longed to live in a big city, away from what I felt to be the deprivations of rural life. My life, it seemed, was always away from everything that was important.
Beyond that, I tormented myself by comparing my life, my body, and my anonymity to the grace, attractiveness, and fame of the professional athletes, movie stars, and other celebrities I admired and whose names were household words. For me, they had real lives, ones I could only envy. Moreover, I felt a deeper restlessness that had to do with my soul. Despite the genuine intimacy of a close family and a close-knit community within which I had dozens of friends and relatives, I ached for a singular, erotic intimacy with a soulmate. Finally, I lived with an inchoate anxiety that I didn’t understand and which mostly translated itself into fear, fear of not measuring up and fear of how I was living life in face of the eternal.
That was the cursed part, but all of this also brought a blessing. Inside the cauldron of that disquiet I discerned (heard) a call to religious life which I fought for a long time because it seemed the antithesis of everything I longed for. How can a burning restlessness, filled with eros, be a call to celibacy? How can an egotistical desire for fame, fortune, and recognition be an invitation to join a religious order whose charism is to live with the poor? It didn’t make sense, and, paradoxically, that’s why, finally, it was the only thing that did made sense. I gave in to its nudging and it was right for me.
It landed me inside religious life and what I’ve lived and learned there has helped me, slowly through the years, to process my own restlessness and begin to live inside my own skin. Beyond prayer and spiritual guidance, two intellectual giants in particular helped me. As a student, aged 19, I began to study Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. My mind was still young and unformed but I grasped enough of what I was reading to begin to befriend the restless complexities inside my own soul – and inside the human soul in general. Even at age 19 (maybe particularly at 19) one can existentially understand Augustine’s dictum: You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.
And then there was Thomas Aquinas who asked: What is the adequate object of the human intellect and will? In short, what would we have to know and be in love with in order to satisfy every flame of restlessness within us? His answer: Everything! The adequate object of the human intellect and will is Being as such – God, all people, all nature. Only that would satisfy us.
Except … that’s not what we mostly think. The particular restlessness that I experienced in my youth is today in fact a near-universal disease. Virtually all of us believe that the good life is had only by those who live elsewhere, away from our own limited, ordinary, insignificant, and small-town lives. Our culture has colonized us to believe that wealth, celebrity, and comfort are the adequate object of the human intellect and will. They are, for us, “Being as such.” In our culture’s current perception, we look at the beautiful bodies, celebrity status, and wealth of our athletes, movie stars, television hosts, and successful entrepreneurs and believe that they have the good life and we don’t. We’re on the outside, looking in. We’re now, in effect, all farm kids in the outback envying life in the big city, a life accessible only to a highly select few, while we’re crucified by the false belief that life is only exciting elsewhere, not where we live.
But our problem is, as Rainer Marie Rilke once pointed out to an aspiring young poet who believed that his own humble surroundings didn’t provide him with the inspiration he needed for poetry, that if we can’t see the richness in the life we’re actually living then we aren’t poets.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

Persistence, determination needed in making abortion unthinkable

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Guest Column
March for Life president Jeanne Mancini calls abortion “the greatest human rights abuse of our time.”
She’s right. More than 60 million human lives snuffed out by abortion since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision – broken down, that’s one child killed every 23 seconds. No other mass killing is as large as this.
Mancini asked the crowd attending the 46th annual March for Life Jan. 18 if they will keep marching to fight abortion, to march for the “poorest of the poor” and those who cannot march for themselves until “we no longer need to march” and abortion “is unthinkable.” She received a resounding “yes” to each question.
Speaking to more than 2,400 teens from St. Louis attending the Generation Life pilgrimage, Archbishop Robert J. Carlson stressed importance of remaining determined and persistent in our efforts to make abortion unthinkable.
“Each abortion is more than just a number,” he said. “It’s a tiny baby whose life was snuffed out and a mother injured in the process. … There are always alternatives, right? Always alternatives.”
He’s also right. Just days before the March for Life, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson in his State of the State address told the Missouri Legislature that his administration will be “promoting a culture of life.” He also recommended almost $6.5 million for Missouri’s Alternatives to Abortion program in the next fiscal budget. Funding goes toward resources, including food, clothing and supplies related to pregnancy and parenting, housing, prenatal care, transportation and utilities and more.
That’s just one piece of the support. Pregnancy centers across Missouri are introducing mothers to their babies through ultrasounds made possible by the Knights of Columbus Meet Life campaign. But the help doesn’t stop there. These same centers are connecting their clients to resources that will support them as they raise their children.
That conveys a message that pregnancy centers support both the parent and child – not just at the moment of pregnancy and birth, but well beyond, said Karen Ludwig, executive director of My Life Medical and Resource Center in High Ridge.
“You can’t say ‘choose life,’ and then – ‘oh, good luck,’” Ludwig said. “It’s wonderful to be able to walk alongside them.”
The pilgrims who traveled to Washington have been charged with the call to bring back a pro-life message to their local communities. This cannot be a simple message of saying that we’re pro-life. It must become a way of life – in our everyday actions and attitudes toward others.
Forty-six years after Roe v. Wade, we still have a lot of work in front of us. But it’s important to trust in God’s timing, and to keep a steady hand in the work of helping women to choose life over abortion.
“It’s all in God’s hands, and we have to trust that,” said Respect Life Apostolate executive director Karen Nolkemper. “We have to realize that prayer united to sacrifice is the most powerful force on earth. We have to stay focused on the truth. We don’t always see the fruits of our prayers, but stories of hope keep us going.”

(This unsigned editorial was published online Jan. 24 on the website of the St. Louis Review, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of St. Louis. It is reprinted courtesy of Catholic News Service)

What makes for wisdom?

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Sister alies therese

FROM THE HERMITAGE
By Sister alies therese
“It has been said that ‘a person is enlightened,’ not ‘when they get an idea’, but ‘when someone looks at them.’ For God, to gaze is to love, and to work favors.’ These eyes are effective: ‘God’s gaze works four blessings in the soul: it cleanses the person, makes her beautiful, enriches and enlightens her.’” (The Impact of God, Father Iain Matthew, OCD)
If anyone has ever looked at you with eyes of love you know how disarming and how beautiful it is. Others have scorned you or ‘looked right through you’ and somehow you have been demeaned or rejected. Sometimes, though, it gets all mixed up!
“On their golden wedding a couple were busy all day with celebrations. They were grateful when evening came and they were alone on the porch watching the sunset. The old man gazed fondly at his wife and said, ‘Agatha, I’m proud of you!’ ‘What did you say? asked the old woman. ‘You know I’m hard of hearing,.. say it louder.’ ‘I said, I’m proud of you.’ ‘That’s all right,’ she replied a bit dejected, ‘I’m tired of you too!’ (deMello,1997)
Oops…
If we have learned to love, to share that love with others, and have learned to receive what others offer us, we have moved deeply into the mystery of the universe: unconditional love. Sometimes we jump at what we know or what we think we know, very conditional. Sometimes we offer ourselves to a kind of quick wisdom that lasts but a moment and then flits away. Clearly, whatever it is we need to learn to gaze at takes a lifetime. Perhaps it will be through art or writing, reading or hugging, trusting or praying that we will discover this gaze. It is this gaze that we want to desire to share with others.
“Some people will never learn anything because they grasp everything too soon. Wisdom, after all, is not a station you arrive at but a manner of traveling. If you travel too fast, you will miss the scenery. To know exactly where you’re headed may be the best way to go astray. Not all those who loiter are lost.” (deMello,1997)
Wisdom comes from various places. Like this five-year-old who, when asked, reported: “Solomon had 300 wives and 700 porcupines.” Really? Things can get very mixed up. Another child, a six-year-old, reported: “The first Book of the Bible is Guinessis in which Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree.” OK? Really? Where do we get our wisdom information? We know when we stare blankly at the 24-hour news cycles we will get information or alternate facts, but will we be any the wiser?
The gaze of love is a theme frequented in mystical literature. In the 14th Century, Julian of Norwich explored this notion in her book Revelations of Divine Love. There are many examples in her writings but let’s consider this one in Chapter 50:
“But I still marveled … Good Lord, I see You, who are truth itself, and I know that we sin grievously all the time, yet You show us no blame … between these two contraries my reason was greatly belabored by my blindness … my longing endured as I continued to gaze at Him.”
In her book of 1993, Sister Wendy (d.2018) The Gaze of Love, Meditations on Art, she asks us to learn to look with love, not only at things, but at art, one another, and certainly in prayer. She says this: “Prayer is God’s taking possession of us. We expose to Him what we are, and He gazes on us with the creative eye of Holy Love. His gaze is transforming: He does not leave us in our poverty but draws into being all we are meant to become. How God gazes is not our business. We are only asked to let Him take possession. If we want God to be our all, then we shall want to do whatever pleases Him … holiness means seeing the world through God’s eyes.” This would be true wisdom, not just information or facts. These, as we’ve seen, can easily get us confused.
On the announcement board outside the Church we find: Morning Sermon: Jesus Walks on Water. Evening Sermon: Searching for Jesus. Oops. Gaze upon someone with love and as Valentine’s Day is just a day, make it when you can risk coming out from behind your barriers. Let yourself be loved into freedom!
BLESSINGS.

(Sister alies therese is a vowed Catholic solitary who lives an eremitical life. Her days are formed around prayer, art and writing. She is author of six books of spiritual fiction and is a columnist. She lives and writes in Mississippi.)

Celibacy – a personal apologia

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Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
As a vowed, religious celibate I’m very conscious that today celibacy, whether lived out in a religious commitment or in other circumstances, is suspect, under siege, and is offering too little by way of a helpful apologia to its critics.
Do I believe in the value of consecrated celibacy? The only real answer I can give must come from my own life. What’s my response to a culture that, for the most part, believes celibacy is both a naiveté and a dualism that stands against the goodness of sexuality, renders its adherents less than fully human, and lies at the root of the clerical sexual abuse crisis within the Roman Catholic Church? What might I say in its defense?
First, that celibacy isn’t a basis for pedophilia. Virtually all empirical studies indicate that pedophilia is a diagnosis not linked to celibacy. But then let me acknowledge its downside: Celibacy is not the normal state for anyone. When God made the first man and woman, God said: “It is not good for the human being to be alone.” That isn’t just a statement about the constitutive place of community within our lives (though it is that); it’s a clear reference to sexuality, its fundamental goodness, and its God-intended place in our lives. From that it flows that to be a celibate, particularly to choose to be one, comes fraught with real dangers. Celibacy can, and sometimes does, lead to an unhealthy sense of one’s sexual and relational self and to a coldness that’s often judgmental. It can too, understandably, lead to an unhealthy sexual preoccupation within the celibate and it provides access to certain forms of intimacy within which a dangerous betrayal of trust can occur. Less recognized, but a huge danger, is that it can be a vehicle for selfishness. Simply put, without the conscription demands that come with marriage and child-raising there’s the ever-present danger that a celibate can, unconsciously, arrange his life too much to suit his own needs.
Thus celibacy is not for everyone; indeed it’s not for the many. It contains an inherent abnormality. Consecrated celibacy is not simply a different lifestyle. It’s anomalous, in terms of the unique sacrifice it asks of you, where, like Abraham going up the mountain to sacrifice Isaac, you’re asked to sacrifice what’s most precious to you. As Thomas Merton, speaking of his own celibacy, once said: The absence of woman is a fault in my chastity. But, for the celibate as for Abraham, that can have a rich purpose and contain its own potential for generativity.
As well, I believe that consecrated celibacy, like music or religion, needs to be judged by its best expressions and not by its aberrations. Celibacy should not be judged by those who have not given it a wholesome expression but by the many wonderful women and men, saints of the past and present, who have given it a wholesome and generative expression. One could name numerous saints of the past or wonderfully healthy and generative persons from our own generation as examples where vowed celibacy has made for a wholesome, happy life that inspires others: Mother Teresa, Jean Vanier, Oscar Romero, Raymond E. Brown, and Helen Prejean, to name just a few. Personally, I know many very generative, vowed celibates whose wholesomeness I envy and who make celibacy credible – and attractive.
Like marriage, though in a different way, celibacy offers a rich potential for intimacy and generativity. As a vowed celibate I am grateful for a vocation which has brought me intimately into the world of so many people. When I left home at a young age to enter the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, I confess, I didn’t want celibacy. Nobody should. I wanted to be a missionary and a priest and celibacy presented itself as the stumbling block. But once inside religious life, almost immediately, I loved the life, though not the celibacy part. Twice I delayed taking final vows, unsure about celibacy. Eventually I made the decision, a hard leap of trust, and took the vow for life. Full disclosure, celibacy has been for me singularly the hardest part of my more than fifty years in religious life … but, but, at the same time, it has helped create a special kind of entry into the world and into others’ lives that has wonderfully enriched my ministry.
The natural God-given desire for sexual intimacy, for exclusivity in affection, for the marriage bed, for children, for grandchildren, doesn’t leave you, and it shouldn’t. But celibacy has helped bring into my life a rich, consistent, deep intimacy. Reflecting on my celibate vocation, all I may legitimately feel is gratitude.
Celibacy isn’t for everyone. It excludes you from the normal; it seems brutally unfair at times; it’s fraught with dangers ranging from serious betrayal of trust to living a selfish life; and it’s a fault in your very chastity – but, if lived out in fidelity, it can be wonderfully generative and does not exclude you from either real intimacy or real happiness.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

“When I was in prison did you visit me?” (Mt.25: 37)

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Father Jeremy Tobin

Millennial reflections
By Father Jeremy Tobin, O. Praem
Mark your calendars. Catholic Day at the Capitol will be Wednesday, February 27. This will be a time to further develop Catholic Social Teaching in the broad area of Criminal Justice, in several areas: prison reform, re-entry, ending the death penalty, and how to practice restorative justice in families, parishes, and communities. Sue Allen, coordinator for the office of parish social ministries, wrote a piece that already appeared in Mississippi Catholic, and pointed out that restorative justice “follows the model presented in the Gospels.”
Restorative justice is not new. It has been around for some time. On November of 2000, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued “Responsibility, Rehabilitation and Restoration, A Catholic Perspective on Crime and Criminal Justice.” The idea goes back further. “Defining it can be elusive because it is a philosophical way of thinking about crime and conflict, rather than a distinct model or system of law.”
This view holds that “criminal behavior is primarily a violation of one individual to another. When a crime is committed it is the victim who is harmed, not the state. Instead of the offender owing a ‘debt to society’ which must be expunged by experiencing some form of state-imposed punishment, the offender owes a specific debt to the victim which can only be repaid by making good the damage caused.” (Zehr 1990)
The focus is on the victim, the community and all impacted by the offense. In places where this is used, in conjunction with ordinary methods, a sharp decrease in recidivism has occurred. Further evidence of substantial healing among all parties has been recorded.
Last year the day concentrated on mental health. Angela Ladner, Executive Director of the Mississippi Psychiatric Association and Joy Hogge, Executive Director of Mississippi Families as Allies presented the situation of the state’s mental health plan and its shortcomings. The state still struggles with this. They made a good case that mental health is at the bottom of many other social ills, not the least among those is the criminal justice system.
I worked I in that system and still do, providing church services to inmates at the Federal Corrections Complex in Yazoo City, two other priests of our community serve inmates in the Federal Prison near Natchez, a privately-run prison.
Money impacts all of these systems in turn – the state mental health system, state prisons, the whole criminal justice system. Already I have been to joint senate and house judicial A and B committees over the budget for the state’s system. The meeting was well attended by advocates and others. Advocacy groups such as the ACLU, Southern Poverty Law Center, and others offered strong presentations on budget priorities. Budgeting is always an issue, but more so when those behind bars are so stigmatized.
As church we fight to abolish the death penalty. Undergirding our views around criminal justice, mental health, and related issues is the Gospel principle of healing and restoring people’s lives.
The climate in the country is so harsh and punitive, split along every line. I wrote here before about the racial impact on criminal justice commenting on Michelle Alexander’s seminal word on mass incarceration.
All of this advocacy is part of Church. As Church we are to be the healing hand of Jesus. We are to be peacemakers not war-makers.
So talking about restorative justice is about healing of victims, of communities of families and, yes, perpetrators. Why? All are human beings.
We have some terrific people this year who will open your minds and even your hearts. We have John Koufos, National Director of Reentry Initiatives for Right on Crime, and Haley M Brown, Oktibbeha Country prosecutor and law professor at Mississippi State University in Starkville. Read more about their presentations on page 1 of this issue of Mississippi Catholic.
I hope to see many of you there.

(Father Jeremy Tobin, O.Praem, lives at the Priory of St. Moses the Black, Jackson.)

I heard Jesus saying to me …

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Sister Constance Veit

Guest Column
By Sister Constance Veit, LSP
Have you ever received an unexpected message from a friend, maybe a text message or a voice mail that made your day, or even led you to change your outlook on life? This happened to me last month, in the middle of SEEK 2019, the annual conference of the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS).
In his homily at Mass that day, Archbishop Samuel Aquila spoke about bringing the light of Christ into the world’s darkness. He encouraged us to recapture the “sense of eternity,” which, he said, society has lost.
These words echoed in my heart – “sense of eternity” – and then just as I was about to receive Communion, I heard Jesus saying to me, “The elderly … let them teach you.”
As I made my thanksgiving after Communion, I was overcome with joy and gratitude for my vocation, which puts me in daily contact with the elderly. But at the same time I realized how often I take them for granted.
I returned home more aware of all the wisdom and experience our Residents have to share, and more intent on learning from them.
I began to ask our Residents questions – “What does heaven mean to you?” … “What’s the secret to a good life?” … “How have you faced life’s inevitable difficulties?” Their answers left me in admiration.
Mary told me that for her, heaven is everything – her true home and her reason to go on living. “If I didn’t believe in heaven,” she said, “I would be tempted to end my life because there would be no reason to go on living in my condition if it weren’t for the hope of seeing God and my family in heaven.”
Maude, a retired social worker, told me “Heaven is God’s work in us.” When I asked her what that looks like, she smiled and responded, “I just told you! It looks like us!”
Carl, who has dealt with a physical disability his whole life, gave me a pep talk about perseverance and told me that the secret to a good life is to be resolutely joyful, no matter what happens, because “God is always with us!”
It seems to me that these seniors live what Father Raniero Cantalamessa, OFM Cap., the Pope’s own preacher, teaches about the sense of eternity.
“For the believer, eternity is not only a hope, it is also a presence. We have this experience every time that we make a real act of faith in Christ, because ‘you have eternal life, you believe in the name of the Son of God;’ every time we receive Communion, in which ‘we are given the pledge of future glory;’ every time we hear the words of the Gospel which are ‘words of eternal life.’ … Between the life of faith in time and eternal life there is a relationship similar to that which exists between the life of an embryo in the maternal womb and that of the baby, once he has come to the light.”
The elderly in our homes have battled through dark times – both personal and historical – and they have persevered. They really do live on the Bread and the Word of Life as their pledge of future glory.
But they don’t only hope for eternity as a future reality; I believe they experience it as a presence brightening their days and lightening the burdens of old age in a mysterious, but very real way.
They personify the words of St. Paul, “We are not discouraged; rather, although our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this momentary light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to what is seen but to what is unseen; for what is seen is transitory, but what is unseen is eternal.”
In the midst of our frenetic, polarized and materialistic world the elderly remind me of eternal values which are often unseen, but which alone give life beauty and true meaning.
This month in the liturgy we encounter the elderly prophets Simeon and Anna, who greet Jesus, Mary and Joseph in the Temple and confirm Jesus’ identity as the long – awaited Messiah.
As we celebrate the Presentation in the Temple, perhaps we could all make an effort to reach out to the seniors we know so that they will feel like a living part of the community – and so that we may be enriched by their unique gifts and their “sense of eternity!”

(Sister Constance Veit is director of communications for the Little Sisters of the Poor.)

Snake-bitten …

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Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Everything is of one piece. Whenever we don’t take that seriously, we pay a price.
The renowned theologian, Hans Urs Von Balthasar gives an example of this. Beauty, he submits, is not some little “extra” that we can value or denigrate according to personal taste and temperament, like some luxury that we say we cannot afford. Like truth and goodness, it’s one of the properties of God and thus demands to be taken seriously as goodness and truth. If we neglect or denigrate beauty, he says, we will soon enough begin to neglect other areas of our lives. Here are his words:
“Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking then along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name, as if she were an ornament of a bourgeois past, whether he admits it or not, can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.”
Here’s a simpler expression of that. There’s a delightful little African tale that highlights the interconnectedness of everything and illustrates how, if we separate a thing from its sisters, we soon pay a price. The tale goes this way:
Once upon a time, when animals still talked, the mice on a farm called a summit of all the other animals. They were worried, they lamented, because they had seen the mistress of the house buy a mousetrap. They were now in danger. But the other animals scoffed at their anxiety. The cow said that she had nothing to worry about. A tiny little contraption couldn’t harm her. She could crush it with her foot. The pig reacted in a similar way. What did he have to worry about in the face of a tiny trap? The chicken also announced that it had no fear of this gadget. “It’s your concern. No worry for me!” it told the mice.
But all things are interconnected and that soon became evident. The mistress set the mousetrap and, on the very first night, heard it snap. Getting out of her bed to look what it had caught and she saw that it had trapped a snake by its tail. In trying to free the snake she was bitten and the poison soon had her feeling sick and running a fever. She went to the doctor who gave her medicines to combat the poison and advised her: “What you need now to get better is chicken broth.” (You can guess where the rest of this is going.) They slaughtered the chicken, but her fever lingered. Relatives and neighbors came to visit. More food was needed. They slaughtered the pig. Eventually the poison killed her. A huge funeral ensued. A lot of food was needed. The slaughtered the cow.
The moral of the story is clear. Everything is interconnected and our failure to see that leaves us in peril. Blindness to our interdependence, willful or not, is dangerous. We are inextricably tied to each other and to everything in the world. We can protest to the contrary but reality will hold its ground. And so, we cannot truly value one thing while we disdain something else. We cannot really love one person while we hate someone else. And we cannot give ourselves an exemption in one moral area and hope to be morally healthy as a whole. Everything is of one piece. There are no exceptions. When we ignore that truth we are eventually be snake-bitten by it.
I emphasize this because today, virtually everywhere, a dangerous tribalism is setting in. Everywhere, not unlike the animals in that African tale, we see families, communities, churches and whole countries focusing more or less exclusively on their own needs without concern for other families, communities, churches and countries. Other people’s problems, we believe, are not our concern. From the narrowness in our churches, to identity politics, to whole nations setting their own needs first, we hear echoes of the cow, pig and chicken saying: “Not my concern! I’ll take care of myself. You take care of yourself!” This will come back to snake-bite us.
We will eventually pay the price for our blindness and non-concern and we will pay that price politically, socially and economically. But we will even pay a higher price personally. What that snake-bite will do is captured in Von Balthasar’s warning: Whoever ignores or denigrates beauty will, he asserts, eventually be unable to pray or to love. That’s true too in all cases when we ignore our interconnectedness with others. By ignoring the needs of others we eventually corrupt our own wholeness so that we are no longer be able to treat ourselves with respect and empathy and, when that happens, we lose respect and empathy for life itself – and for God – because whenever reality isn’t respected it bites back with a mysterious vengeance.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

Remembering Father Jerome LeDoux, SVD, pastor, preacher, writer

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By Bobby Ardoin (Opelousas Daily World)
OPELOUSAS, Louisiana – Father Jerome Ledoux, SVD, will be remembered as a man of faith, whose prolific religious writings, words of spiritual guidance and affable personality uplifted numerous African American Catholic church congregations across the South for more than six decades.
Father Ledoux, 88, who spent his final three years as a priest at Holy Ghost Catholic Church in Opelousas, was buried Wednesday at the St. Augustine Seminary in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, where he began his religious training at age 13.
A large gathering filled the pews at Holy Ghost on Monday, January 14, for an afternoon visitation that included ceremonial prayers by the Knights of St. Peter Claver, followed by a Mass.
Many of those in attendance provided testimony about Father Ledoux, who died Jan. 7 at Lafayette General Hospital following a nearly month-long treatment for a heart ailment.
Father Ledoux’s ministry, which began in 1957 after his ordination, was often colorful and poignant, according to those who knew him during his various services at St. Augustine Catholic Church in New Orleans, Our Mother of Mercy Catholic Church in Fort Worth, Texas, and at Holy Ghost, whose estimated 2,500 congregation members comprise one of the nation’s largest African American Catholic churches in the U.S.
Until the time of his death, Father Ledoux was also a weekly contributor to publications across the U.S., including Mississippi Catholic.
Father Ledoux’s spiritual guidance and his availability to his parishioners was always legendary, said Robert Carmouche of Opelousas.
“He has been my inspiration. Despite his age, he was still working and that showed that if he could do that, I can too.
“I have kept all of his articles on religion and the e-mails that he would send to me and others in the church. They were wonderful and they addressed how to deal with life and death,” said Carmouche, a University of Louisiana at Lafayette faculty member and Holy Ghost parishioner.
Brenda Curtis, a cook and housekeeper at the Holy Ghost rectory across the street from the church, said Ledoux maintained a dedicated vegan diet. She described Father Ledoux as a “very religious man, an awesome preacher and a wonderful person who lived his faith.”
Curtis said that Father Ledoux’s meals normally consisted of beans, salads, vegetables and fruit. “Oh yes, all of the meals he ate were very healthy and all along he tried to teach us how to do that too,” she said.
Hazel Sias, a two-term St. Landry Parish school board members and Holy Ghost parishioner, said she originally met Father Ledoux years ago while she was visiting in New Orleans.
“He related to people so well. He lived a life of faith and always talked about God. He had the ability to draw people in to what he was saying to them. He could also sing. Sometimes when he’d want to start a song, then hold off, he would ask the pianist to hit a note and (Ledoux) wouldn’t start until the person got the note right.
“From talking with people I know that wherever he went, Father Ledoux’s church parishes loved him. For someone as old as he was, he was able to give advice that touched everyone, all generations,” said Sias.
Carmouche said that what made Ledoux’s communicative skills so effective was his overall demeanor.
“When you met him, you connected immediately because he was such a down-to-earth person. He came across as this normal person, who was also very religious, passionate about his faith.
“Father Ledoux had this unique way of preaching. He wouldn’t just stand in front of his people at church. He sometimes would move through the aisles and mix that presentation with psalms, some of which you could find in scripture and others that I think he must have made up on his own.
“He had this beautiful voice when he sang. It caught your attention and you wanted to join in,” Carmouche said.
Lena Charles, chairman of the Opelousas Downtown Development Authority, said despite his age, Father Ledoux never turned down a chance to speak with someone who needed his advice.
“He just loved people, loved his ministry. His words were always encouraging. The man also loved to write. He’s already written two published books with another that he was completing at the time of death.
“In one of (the books) he talked about his experiences in New Orleans with the church there and about (Hurricane) Katrina. They were all very interesting. When he got ready to write a column, he would send some of us a preview. We all knew how dedicated he was to his writing,” Charles said.
Carlton Jordan of Opelousas said he will never forget how Father Ledoux helped a family member with the death of a relative.
“I got to meet him when he was in Texas. It was then I really got to know him well and my first impression was he had the ability to lead people in the right direction,” Mouton said.
Carmouche said Father Ledoux’s inspiration throughout the church was evident, even despite the health issues.
“He always talked about the need to do something good for someone. What was impressive was how he was able to fight until the end. (Father Ledoux) was not afraid of death,” said Carmouche.

(Reprinted with permission from the Opelousas Daily World.)